yelled, staggering to a halt.
“Wait-”
“Do you see what you’ve done to me? Dolt! Donkey! Don’t you look where you’re going?” He was so drunk he swayed back and forth as he was cursing.
“Calm down, monsieur,” Casson said. “Please.”
“Calm down?”
From the corner of his eye, Casson could see the approaching flic, walking toward them with that look on his face.
“Ah,” the driver said, glad to see the authorities.
“Shut up a second,” Casson said under his breath. “We can work this out between ourselves. Or maybe you just can’t live another minute without a visit to the police station?”
The man stared at him. What? He was so drunk, so much in the wrong, that he would defend himself like a lion. Casson, acutely aware of the Walther in his belt and the guns in the truck, took a wad of hundred-franc notes from his pocket and pressed it into the man’s hand and, using his other hand, curled the man’s fingers around it. Dumbfounded, the driver peered at the money; none of the catastrophes in his chaotic life had ever turned out this well.
The flic arrived. “It’s all settled,” Casson told him.
“You agree?” he asked the driver.
The driver blinked nervously, bit his lip, looked around for help. He knew there was more money to be had, but how to get it? “Well,” he said.
“So be it,” the flic said. “Your papers, right now.”
“No, no,” the driver said. “Nothing happened.”
The flic looked him over. “Go home, Philippe,” he said. “Go to bed.”
The driver staggered back to his van. With great concentration he managed to get the key in the ignition. He started the engine, the van lurched forward, then stalled. The flic put his hands on his hips. The driver started up again and drove away, with dark smoke pouring from the exhaust pipe. The flic turned to Casson, nodded his head at the truck. “Will it run?” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then disappear.”
Casson drove slowly through the snow-covered countryside, bleak and silent. Now, there was nothing but the work of driving a truck, and it steadied him. As he got closer to Chalon the traffic increased. By cutting France into two countries, the Germans had created choke points at the border crossings-Moulins, Bourges, Poitiers, all the towns along the rivers. For the moment, Casson didn’t mind; it felt safe, one truck among many, all of them rumbling north together. But it took longer than he thought it would, and it was six-thirty by the time he found the Quai Gambetta and the warehouse of the Cooperative de Beaune.
Henri was waiting for him. Sitting with his legs dangling off the old wooden loading dock and smoking a cigar. “Enfin,” he said. At last you’re here. They stood together in the cold evening.
“What happened to Degrave?”
Casson told him.
“Milice.” He spat the word. “Degrave deserved better.”
He was, in military life, a sergeant. Casson had already guessed that by the time he got around to mentioning it. A sergeant-good at getting things done, by the book so long as it worked, by being crooked if that’s what it took.
He led Casson into the warehouse; wine in bottles, in small casks and huge wooden barrels. The air inside was thick, a cloud of manure, raspberries, vinegar. “We don’t help ourselves,” Henri confided, the smoke of his cigar hanging in the still air. “Hands off the Romanee. But they always put something out for us, over on the table. When you want to sleep, there’s a cot in the broker’s office. Can’t imagine why he put it there. Naps, maybe. Good for a few hours, anyhow-you look like you could use it.”
By five the next morning they were on the move, riding bicycles past the docks and warehouses, out to the residential districts. “We’ll go and have a look for ourselves,” Henri said, “to see how things are. But I suspect nothing’s changed.”
They pedaled up a long hill to a staid old neighborhood, plane trees and handsome street lamps, to a park on a bluff overlooking the western side of the city. Henri leaned on an iron railing and the two of them talked casually for a time, making sure they were alone. “Have a look,” Henri said, and handed over a pair of binoculars.
Casson could see out over the rooftops to Route 75. Parked by the road, a long line of trucks. Under the direction of German guards, the merchandise in the trucks was being searched; mounds of potatoes or coal probed with pitchforks, crates stacked on the ground, counted, and checked against shipping manifests.
He shifted the binoculars from scene to scene: a driver pacing and smoking, a soldier using a bayonet to pry open a packing case, an officer checking an upright piano-the panel above the keyboard had been removed, baring the strings and hammers. All of this overseen by a group of officers, standing beside an armored car, its machine gun trained on the search area. It would have taken only a moment of indecision, Casson realized. Staying on the main road instead of turning off on the streets that led to the river docks.
“Quite a show,” Henri said. “It didn’t used to be like this.”
“Anything we can do?”
“Oh there’s a way around it, there always is.”
They rode back down the hill, to a crowded market where they walked the bicycles. “One thing I have to let you know,” Henri said. “This is Degrave’s operation-he wanted it done, he ran it. And his friends are going to make sure it’s completed, we owe him that. But then, my guess is that senior officers won’t get involved. So, when it’s over, don’t be surprised if we disappear.”
They waited at the Cooperative until 8:20 in the evening. Henri killed time with stories-twenty years in the army, Beirut, Dakar, Hanoi, Oran. Then they backed the truck out of the loading area, drove to the edge of Chalon, and parked by a bridge. There they waited again. Casson stared out at the icy river, slow and gray, watched the girls, two by two, going home from work over the bridge. A policeman rode by on his bicycle, glanced at them sitting in the truck, but didn’t care. A tramp went past, possessions in a blanket roll on his back. “There’s the life,” Henri said. “Sleep under the stars, answer to no man.” Later on it began to snow. Henri was pleased. “God’s on our side tonight,” he said.
From the river, Casson heard the steady beat of an engine. A barge appeared, moving slowly against the current. It slid neatly below the bridge, then throttled back. On deck, a man walked up to the bow, a match flared. Henri clamped the cigar in his teeth and buttoned up his coat.
The barge was carrying gravel, a tarpaulin tossed casually over the middle of the load. Henri drove the truck onto the bridge and the man on the barge pulled the tarpaulin back, revealing a deep pit dug in the gravel. Sweating in the cold, Casson and Henri dropped the crates a few feet down to the man below, who stacked them in the pit. When the truck was empty, they drove it to the end of the bridge and parked.
“Anything in here?” Henri said. “Papers? Marked maps?”
“Nothing.”
They left the truck, climbed over the railing of the bridge, and dropped to the barge. The last crate lay two feet down, and the three men began to shovel gravel in on top. When they were done, Casson walked to the far end of the barge and leaned against the wall of the pilothouse. A young woman at the helm waved to him through the window. Casson lit a cigarette, his shoulders ached and he was breathing hard.
At the foot of the bridge, the door of the truck slammed shut, the sound sharp in the cold air. Then the engine started up, idled for a moment, and faded away in the streets by the river. Henri appeared out of the snow and handed him a coverall, black with grease and oil. “We have a cabin below,” he said. “Put this on when you get a moment. You’re a deckhand now, you have to look like one.”
Slowly, the barge got under way.
“We stay on the Saone up to the Burgundy Canal. That takes us north-to Dijon and Tonnerre, and up the river Yonne all the way to Montereau, near Versailles, where we get on the Seine. About three days, if the rivers don’t freeze.”
“The gravel goes to Paris?”
“Normandy. They’re building like crazy on the coast. Big stuff. Sand and gravel and cement, barged in from all
